EXISTENCE AND EQUILIBRATION OF GLOBAL WEAK SOLUTIONS TO KINETIC MODELS FOR DILUTE POLYMERS I: FINITELY EXTENSIBLE NONLINEAR BEAD-SPRING CHAINS

Abstract

We show the existence of global-in-time weak solutions to a general class of coupled FENE-type bead-spring chain models that arise from the kinetic theory of dilute solutions of polymeric liquids with noninteracting polymer chains. The class of models involves the unsteady incompressible Navier–Stokes equations in a bounded domain in ℝd, d = 2 or 3, for the velocity and the pressure of the fluid, with an elastic extra-stress tensor appearing on the right-hand side in the momentum equation. The extra-stress tensor stems from the random movement of the polymer chains and is defined by the Kramers expression through the associated probability density function that satisfies a Fokker–Planck-type parabolic equation, a crucial feature of which is the presence of a centre-of-mass diffusion term. We require no structural assumptions on the drag term in the Fokker–Planck equation; in particular, the drag term needs not be corotational. With a square-integrable and divergence-free initial velocity datum ṵ0 for the Navier–Stokes equation and a non-negative initial probability density function ψ0 for the Fokker–Planck equation, which has finite relative entropy with respect to the Maxwellian M, we prove, via a limiting procedure on certain regularisation parameters, the existence of a global-in-time weak solution t ↦ (ṵ(t), ψ(t)) to the coupled Navier–Stokes–Fokker–Planck system, satisfying the initial condition (ṵ(0), ψ(0)) = (ṵ0, ψ0), such that t ↦ ṵ(t) belongs to the classical Leray space and t ↦ ψ(t) has bounded relative entropy with respect to M and t ↦ ψ(t)/M has integrable Fisher information (w.r.t. the measure [Formula: see text] over any time interval [0, T], T > 0. If the density of body forces [Formula: see text] on the right-hand side of the Navier–Stokes momentum equation vanishes, then a weak solution constructed as above is such that t ↦ (ṵ(t), ψ(t)) decays exponentially in time to [Formula: see text] in the [Formula: see text] norm, at a rate that is independent of (ṵ0, ψ0) and of the centre-of-mass diffusion coefficient.